


passion (for agriculture)

by arielmagicesi



Series: Pynch week prompts 2016 [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 03:11:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7784401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arielmagicesi/pseuds/arielmagicesi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry wants to get to know the group, so he asks them a few questions that end up revealing more to Adam about himself than he perhaps would have liked.<br/>Pynch week, day 3, prompt: passion. I thought I would try something with this prompt that wasn't just a PWP.</p>
            </blockquote>





	passion (for agriculture)

It started when Henry decided he wanted to get to know everyone more. It was a month or so after Gansey’s death and rebirth, and although they’d all pretty much accepted Henry as part of the group now, there was still some awkwardness.

“All right,” Henry had said, one night when they were all hanging out at Monmouth. “Let’s just do this. Personality questionnaire. I have one loaded up right here,” and he held up his phone.

“That sounds terrible,” Ronan said immediately.

“Too bad, you’re gonna have to do it anyway. We’re all gonna answer these honestly so I can get to know you and you can get to know me. Okay?”

“It sounds like fun,” Gansey said.

“It sounds terrible. I’m not participating.”

“Your choice not to participate, Lynch,” Henry said, “is a participation in itself. It reveals something about your personality all on its own.”

Ronan groaned in annoyance and leaned back on his side of the couch. Adam didn’t think this sounded like the most fun activity, either, but he didn’t really care. Henry’s weird ideas of fun often turned out to be more interesting than he expected.

“All right, question one,” Henry said. “A genie pops out of a bottle, offers you one wish. What do you wish for?”

“I wish I didn’t have to participate in this fucking game,” Ronan said.

“Aha, but that answer in itself is a participation-”

“I wish you weren’t such a smartass.”

“I think,” Blue said, “I would wish to have some less annoying friends.”

This caused Adam to laugh, which earned him a betrayed look from Ronan.

“Does anyone here have an answer that’s not sarcastic?” Henry asked.

Gansey, clearly trying to be agreeable, said, “I’m not sure. I guess it’s a difficult one for us to answer because we spent so much time, well, thinking about just that. Thinking about what favor we’d ask for if we could.”

Then the room got quiet.

Henry cleared his throat, looking regretful.

“OK, OK, forget that question,” he said quickly. “Next one. This one’s more fun. If your voice was a color, what color would it be?”

“That’s the dumbest fucking question I’ve ever heard,” Ronan said.

Henry fixed him with a curious gaze.

“You really have to let your guard down for once in your life, man,” he said.

Ronan’s eyes narrowed. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re allowed to have fun, you don’t have to pretend to hate it just to seem extra masculine or something.”

“Great psychoanalysis, Cheng, but I know how to have fun. This is just a dumbass game.”

“Can you guys not have a passive-aggressive-off?” Blue said. “I’ll answer. If my voice was a color, I think it’d be green. Like, the kind of green leaves get when the sun shines through them in early June.”

“That’s specific,” Adam said.

Blue shrugged. “I had extra time to think about it while those two were arguing.”

“First real answer of the game,” Henry said. “Good one, Blue-bell. All right. What about you, Parrish?”

Ronan glanced over at Adam, which gave away pretty easily that he was genuinely interested in the answer Adam would give.

“Uh,” Adam said, because it was a weird question. “I don’t know. Brown, maybe? Like, a dirt color.”

“Interesting,” Henry said, raising his eyebrows.

Adam looked over at Ronan, who looked somewhat confused. He wondered what that meant. He wondered what Ronan would say his voice looked like, if he’d been asked.

“My voice, for the record, is rose gold,” Henry said. “Very luxurious.”

Blue stifled a giggle. “You’re ridiculous, Henry.”

“Leaves you, Gansey boy,” Henry said, looking over at Gansey. “And Lynch if he feels like actually answering.”

“I don’t,” Ronan said, sounding less harsh than before.

“All right, I’ll answer,” Gansey said. “I think my voice is… blue.”

Blue rolled her eyes, looking at Gansey fondly.

“No, I mean it,” Gansey said. “Maybe periwinkle, or cerulean-”

“Blech, you ruined it,” Blue said, but she was still smiling. She looked over at Henry. “This is pretty fun, actually. What’s the next question?”

Henry looked down at his phone. “OK, question three. What do you find attractive in other people?”

Blue’s face lit up gleefully.

“Oh, Henry,” she said. “No one in this room is going to be comfortable answering that.”

“That’s not true,” Gansey said. “I’m attracted to people named Blue Sargent-”

Everyone groaned collectively, and Ronan said, “You just proved her right, we’re all fucking uncomfortable now.”

“Wanna prove her wrong, then?” Henry said, his expression a bit of a challenge. “Unless you’re too uncomfortable talking about feelings.”

Ronan crossed his arms and glared back at Henry. Adam was impressed that he managed to keep his stony glare fairly intact despite having a blush running all down his neck.

“Glaring at me isn’t an answer, Lynch,” Henry said.

“Aw, come on,” Blue said. “There’s no need to tease him-”

“Hands,” Ronan said. “I dunno, I like nice… hands. Is that good enough of an answer for you, Cheng, or do you want a five-paragraph essay?”

Adam’s face cracked into a smile, impossibly endeared by that answer, and he leaned across the couch so his and Ronan’s shoulders were pressed together.

Henry looked a little impressed.

“Parrish, let me see your hands, I forgot what they look like,” he said.

“I’m not letting you guys ogle my hands,” Adam said, sticking one hand in his pocket and the other behind Ronan’s back.

“If I had to answer, you all have to answer,” Ronan said. “What about you, Sargent, since you’re so sure about how repressed we all are?”

“That’s not what I said,” Blue said.

“Fine, so answer.”

Blue turned a little pink, but to her credit, didn’t back down.

“Not sure,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it. Uh… I guess I’m attracted to passion. Like, passion for things in life, I don’t know.”

“Passion for finding medieval monarchs?” Henry asked.

Blue glared at him. “No. Like, passion to live life to the fullest. To strive for something more than some boring small-town existence. Instead of just living day in, day out… living for something.”

Gansey was fixing her with a starry-eyed gaze. Adam was a little flattered, himself, considering that Blue had been attracted to _him_ at one point.

“Hmm,” Henry said. “You know, not to invalidate your feelings or anything, but I think everyone’s attracted to that. Aren’t they? No one would want to date someone who lives life without any passion for anything.”

Blue looked a little annoyed at that, but she said, “Fair point. Anyone else want to weigh in?”

“I suppose that’s true,” Gansey said. “I mean, you’re most attractive when you’re giving a passionate speech or the like.”

Blue turned bright red and said, “God, Gansey.”

Adam was turning the point over in his head. He agreed with Henry. Who didn’t find passion attractive? He thought, somewhat involuntarily, of Ronan’s eyes when he drove too fast late at night. And how Ronan talked about dreaming, when he was talking seriously about it. The way he kissed Adam when he wasn’t holding back, when they both lost control a little bit.

“Parrish?” Henry was saying. “What’s your answer?”

Adam glanced up. He hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation.

“I agree with you and Blue,” he said. “I guess everyone finds passion attractive.”

 

Now he was thinking about it again, which was annoying. Ever since Henry had become friends with them, Adam was always thinking about his life theories- his theory that everyone was secretly bisexual (Adam disagreed; he thought there was a difference between some sexual curiosity and actually being bisexual, but he didn’t feel like arguing with Henry about it), or his theory that font choices in menus could change someone’s appetite (Adam had no feelings on this one, but was annoyed that he now thought about it every time he saw a menu).

The theory that passion was the most attractive quality to anyone- that was getting to him.

Adam’s passion in life was for learning. He felt most alive when he was methodically solving a puzzle, working out a calculus problem or figuring out how to fix an engine. When he learned about how precisely electrons arranged themselves in a cell, or when he understood a law of physics after rereading the paragraph in his textbook that explained it- that was passion, to him, that was what he cared about.

He was attracted to passion for a subject. Passion for a particular type of knowledge. So he probably should have expected this, when he walked out into the garden right outside the main house at the Barns.

The garden was inexplicably, magically alive, even though it was winter by now. It wasn’t in full bloom, to be sure, but the zucchini plants were still alive and there were patches of herbs that Adam knew should have been wilted by now.

Opal was kneeling in the soil next to Ronan, wearing gloves and watching Ronan intently. Ronan was holding a pair of garden shears and talking to her. Adam walked over, being sure to step carefully and not destroy the plants.

“OK, so what you do- Opal, fucking listen- you have to dig down a bit. Don’t mess with the leaves of the actual plant.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because you might bruise it. You gotta be careful with the plants, they’re like babies or something. See the stem here? That’s how it gets all its water and food, through that stem.”

“Where does the water and food come from?” Opal asked.

“From the soil. That’s why you have to water the soil, not the fucking leaves. The roots, down in the soil, they take in nutrients and water from the soil.”

“What’s nutrients?”

“It’s like, shit the plant needs to live. Like nitrogen and shit. That’s why I bought that soil, you remember, the one that I told you not to eat? It’s enriched soil. It has all the different types of nutrients that the plant might need, just in case the soil here doesn’t have it. Which it fucking doesn’t, because the soil here is shit.”

Adam let out a strange, half-there breath, and Ronan turned around at the sound.

“Hey, Parrish,” he said, looking calm but focused.

Adam wasn’t sure what had just happened, but he knew that he wanted to get Ronan alone. He wanted to hear Ronan talk for hours about the shitty soil and why exactly he’d bought that new soil and how nutrients worked their way into plants.

This was, he was sure, Henry’s fault. Ronan was passionate about farming, and Henry had made that damn speech about passion being attractive, and damn it. Adam was going to lose his mind.

“Adam!” Opal cried, turning around.

“Opal, fucking watch your step!” Ronan said.

“The plants are babies. I know,” Opal said. “Adam, you have to help do weeding.”

“What’s weeding?” Adam asked, putting on a mischievous smile. “I think I’d understand better if Ronan explained it.”

Ronan narrowed his eyes at Adam. “You look like you have an ulterior motive here.”

Adam shrugged, walking over carefully. “Thought it was funny to see you teaching her. I never thought I’d see the day Ronan Lynch was a teacher.”

“Oh, are you into that?” Ronan said, looking over at him. Opal was sneaking off now, heading to the corner of the garden where Adam knew she kept a collection of interestingly-shaped twigs.

“Into what?” Adam asked.

“The whole teacher thing. I can do that, if you want.”

“Nah,” Adam said, which wasn’t entirely true. “I just like that you’re talking about something you’re passionate about.”

He knelt down next to the basil plant that Ronan was weeding around.

“You’re weird as fuck, Parrish,” Ronan said, but he was a little red.

“Talk more about soil,” Adam said, leaning in and kissing Ronan’s jaw.

“You’re really weird as fuck.”

“I’ll kiss you more if you tell me more facts about agriculture.”

“That’s the weirdest fetish I’ve ever heard of,” Ronan said, but his voice was a little strained, and Adam felt like he was going insane and he didn’t really mind.

Ronan told him more facts about agriculture.

**Author's Note:**

> who knows if any of that stuff about soil and plants was accurate, haha, I just wanted to establish that Adam has no chill as always  
> additionally: Ronan thinks the color of Adam's voice is golden like stalks of wheat during sunset in July.


End file.
